20 Bulletin of Wisconsin Natural History Society. Vol. 1, No. 1. 
Such villages, if we may accept the tales and descriptions given 
by early voyagers and travelers, had no stockades or visible 
means of defense beyond the natural barriers, ravines, swamps, 
bluffs and the fastnesses of the dense forest in which they reposed. 
It will be noticed that the location of the Teller mounds is just 
such as would be chosen for the location of a village site. 
Located in the midst of a once dense forest filled with game, 
protected on its eastern side by a ravine, on the north by a former- 
ly-existing morass supplying wild rice, and a river replete with 
fish, on the south and west by the effigies themselves representing 
the power of the gods. 
There were clear springs in the ravine and probably garden 
plats or cornfields in the near neighborhood, such as Dr. Lapham 
has described in connection with other groups he found here. 
The location was an ideal one and the spot particularly at- 
tractive. 
It is quite likely from the small amount of property enclosed 
(some 20 acres), that the village was not as large or important 
as some others in the state to which it bears many striking simi- 
larities. 
Not only is it probable that there was formerly a mound builder 
village at this point, but it was one of a complete system of vil- 
lages and their outworks which, if we examine Dr. I. A. Lapham's 
''Map of Works in the Vicinity of Milwaukee" (republished here- 
with), we shall find extended up the Milwaukee River Valley 
from its mouth through Milwaukee and Ozaukee Counties to 
above West Bend in Washington County. 
A pretty good idea of this systematic arrangement of mounds 
along river systems mav be had by glancing at the government 
archseologic maps of Wisconsin and other states, and noting es- 
pecially the distribution of works along the Muskingum and other 
rivers in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. Such a system would bring 
the clans into closer communication in war or trade. 
It had been intended by this section that an attempt should 
be made by the societv to preserve this last surviving memorial of 
prehistoric man in Milwaukee County, bv recommending its pur- 
chase bv the city for park purposes, but since the beginning of this 
publication, vandal hands and relic seekers have again and again 
dug into and disturbed the tranquility of the efiigies, so that now 
such recommendation would not be acceptable. 
Like the unique magnificent works at Aztalan and manv other 
important monuments of the culture of a prehistoric race that once 
dominated the whilom Northwestern Territorv. the Teller group 
of mounds in Milwaukee County is doomed to destruction and 
oblivion. 
